PublishingNOW Roadmap (The Press Release That Should Have Been)

Last week, I was fairly disparaging about ADAM owned publishing software vendor, Van Gennep and their press release about PublishingNOW! 1.2.  The copy made it sound more like they were planning to blow up a roundabout near the offices of some publishing company rather than release an updated version of their product.

Well, it seems like some shoulders may have got tapped on last week at ADAM or Van Gennep and shortly afterwards they issued a ‘roadmap’ which has some more useful material that tells you what it is and what is new.  Since they have done something about our critique (which was probably imparted to them by a few more people than just us here at DAM News) then it’s only fair that we report that also.

The new features are as follows:

• DAM Integration – search for and use assets from your DAM library, then assign content to production with drag-and-drop.
• Share content across titles and channels.
• Upload – send multiple files at once via drag and drop.
• Search – create, save and share search queries.
• Auto Import – XML-based, one-click import automates tasks including auto-generation of subjects, linked files, placed subjects on flat plan (print or digital).
• Annotations – create and modify sticky notes in Quick View mode and in InDesign at all production stages.
• Briefings – get your team ready with shared instructions and key information.
• Article editor – manage structured data then push it multi-channel including WCMS and InDesign (with options to map styles to tags, providing one-click, formatted import).
• Flat plan for tablets – iPad and other tablet devices can now benefit from advanced digital flat planning.
• Page numbering – Apply flat plan page numbering to linked InDesign files.

They plan to introduce iOS interfaces in January 2013 as well as tools for managing video and semantic searching.  The updated release is due 9th November 2012.

We’re going to bypass the quote from the product manager as that’s still nonsense unfortunately, but the detail above is still much better than their first attempt, nonetheless.  The full details are here.  Van Gennep’s website is light on text, but might be useful to some: http://www.vangennep.nl/

Note to other vendors, if you don’t want  to end up in our DAM vendor PR ‘hall of shame’ as well (or ignored completely) then send us material that is useful and contains actual facts that tell prospective users what your product is and what is new about it.  Your end users will be the ones that will judge whether it is ‘revolutionary’ and likely to cause ‘major disruption to the [insert vertical here] market’ – that isn’t something you can just assert and expect to get away with it unchallenged.

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